believed there to be great quickness of intelligence, great eagerness for new ideas, great love of the beautiful thought that again was largely subject to the dictates of what was called fashion. If only he could help, though ever so slightly, to bring that about, how noble an achievement, and how worthy of utmost and tireless effort!
Then, even in the middle of these reflections, a train of thought more vivid than they drew its shining furrow like a comet across his brain, and it was illuminated with the image of her who had made his own aims so dazzlingly real to him. She had spoken like one inspired; it was as if the spirit of the culture and loveliness of which she spoke had become incarnate in her. And then he knew that he was thinking no more about what she said, but about the girl who said it.
He was alone in the house that night, though he expected guests next day, and, as was his custom when by himself, dined with frugality on a couple of dishes, intending to spend a long evening among his books. There was a volume of French memoirs of the years preceding the Revolution that he was eager to read, and had just begun, but to-night the splendour of the time seemed dimmed to him. The gold and the carving were there, the sound of its flutes and the measure of its dances, but below in the cellar of the house beautiful were darkness and mildew and rotting foundations. Sounds of cracking and falling mingled with the music of the flutes, and it was not only with the swift feet of the dancers that the floor shook. The witty, lighthearted pages seemed blistered with some corruption that came from within; the laughter was not sound; the flute-player eyed the dancers with stealthy, hating glances.
He shut the book up quickly. It was not from a rotten, decaying stem that the true flowers sprang, nor from a tainted soil. "Pamper your passion for what is lovely "—those were Lucia's words, but, "lovely means so much," she said also. She had understood him so well; here it seemed that he understood her as completely. The loveliness must begin from within; he was sure she meant that.
Radium! She had said that Brixham needed radium. He understood that also; it wanted, and the whole world wanted, those who by their own nature burned and were unconsumed; those whose property was light that came not from the combustion of other things, but from their own illuminating nature. He had seen radium, he thought, in Brixham that day—even her
